West Coast Fashionista Takes On Manhattan, Manolos in Tow

It is has been hard to watch “The Hills” without developing at least a tepid affection for the person-character of Whitney Port. Her fixed expression of feigned surprise suggests she is willing to risk everything — even wrinkles by the time she is 26 — all for the art of pseudo-improvised reality television.

“The Hills,” which recently concluded its fourth season, is MTV’s ethnography of young people with enviable dentistry living in Hollywood and aspiring to careers that sociologists 50 years ago would have ascribed to the world of science fiction. Whitney had been courtier to Lauren Conrad’s queen of the canyons until she decided to leave Los Angeles and a job at a company called People’s Revolution, where she wore headsets and helped produce fashion shows. She was moving to New York to take up an offer to work as a publicity assistant at Diane von Furstenberg, a job Whitney describes early on in “The City,” a new series about her acclimatizing to Manhattan, as “an opportunity of a lifetime.” (“The City” is broadcast Mondays on MTV following “Bromance,” a comparatively conventional but completely unwatchable reality show also spun from “The Hills.”)

On “The Hills” Whitney’s private life was largely conducted off camera, allowing her to pass as the show’s pre-eminent careerist. It wasn’t all that long into her internship at Teen Vogue that she knew she wanted more out of life: she wanted to become a stylist. During her interview at People’s Revolution she didn’t cower when her new boss explained that she would essentially be giving up every waking moment of her life: “Like you’re basically making a deal with the devil,” her boss warns her. Whitney’s work ethic was rivaled only briefly by Heidi Montag’s, during a period when Heidi was refusing to submit to her boyfriend’s oppressive authority and aiming to become the Carly Fiorina of event planning.

Paradoxically Whitney now finds herself in the great city of ambition doing little more than dating a jerky Australian rock singer named Jay. He thinks she should believe him when he tells her he isn’t sleeping with his ex-girlfriend because of the “energy” he displays when he’s trying to convince her. Whitney’s job seems to require only that she show up in good shoes, so she’s got lots of time to deal with Jay’s arrogance, and Jay’s got lots of time to deal with a head of hair so voluminous it could house a groundhog.

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Hello, New York: Whitney Port, now a publicity assistant at Diane von Furstenberg, in the MTV reality series The City, a spinoff of The Hills.Credit
MTV

In the show’s phony anthropological characterization he is meant to be emblematic of “downtown,” because he doesn’t care what people think, and he doesn’t comb. Sharing the burden of symbolism is Whitney’s roommate, Erin, who is meant to suggest a below-14th Street vibe by dint of her odd-color nail polish and wacky hats.

Uptown is represented by a fantastically detestable office rival of Whitney’s, Olivia Palermo, who has provided the show’s single greatest contribution to the nomenclature of reality TV by referring to herself not as a socialite but as a “social.” This has the benefit of confirming for whoever might actually be wondering that she is in no position to unseat Anne Bass. If you ask me, Olivia is the only reason the cameras ever ought to be in the DVF headquarters, given how little appears to go on there beyond pointless staff meetings underscoring the urgency of fashion week.

Olivia is the uptown not of Brearley and Yale but of ostentatious dressing and dumb luck. She transmits her ding-dong thoughts in imperious glares, and reeks of the insecurities of entitlement. She wants to make sure Whitney understands who she is, though we are given no idea of where in the world the Palermo name is supposed to resonate. At a press event for Manolo Blahnik, she tells Whitney she got her first pair of the designer’s heels for her coming-out party, then says it again after she has claimed that Manolo himself is a family friend even as he barely appears to recognize her.

“The City” is not the advertisement for New York that “The Hills,” with its dreamily shot opening-credit sequence, is for Los Angeles. There seems to be West Coast bias at play because Manhattan is made to look boxy and claustrophobic and, so far at least, is evoked primarily by images of the meatpacking district at night. In only one shot, of Whitney and Jay together, does New York seem like a place of possibility and does “The City” look as it should, like a Woody Allen movie for people who might stumble on a copy of The New York Review of Books and wonder why there are no ads for Chanel.

Still, the pleasures of “The City” are greater than any attempted in “Bromance,” in which Brody Jenner — of “The Princes of Malibu,” “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” and “The Hills” — sets out to find a best friend among a bunch of chumps competing for the position.

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Whos your buddy? Brody Jenner, left, in search of a best friend in the MTV reality series Bromance, a spinoff of The Hills.Credit
MTV

Why would you want to be Bruce Jenner’s son’s best friend? So you can go to parties and meet lots of women. What do you have to do to become his consigliere, his sidekick, his mandate? You have to find as many good-looking women as you can and show up at a party with them.

The whole enterprise is really just an act of mental jujitsu because in this environment you are also expected to have good manners. One contestant was eliminated for poor etiquette.

Luckily for whoever wins there is more than a lifetime of carousing with Mr. Jenner. There is also a bachelor pad in Los Angeles, “including the furniture in it,” he tells the contestants, “from West Elm.”